Mimi and Pynchon's Bed and Breakfast

Sometimes, I just don't know: don't know what the right answer is, what the right course of action is, what the right idea is. Don't know how to choose, or how to react. These moments are highly disconcerting to me. It is a quirk of my personality that I am generally quick to decision, and that I have the verbal dexterity to rationalize my decision at great length and persuasively. Generally, I'm loathe to say, I don't know or I'm not sure or I can't decide.

Tonight, I'm going to weigh in again on the great daycare question, and I'm going to start by saying those words that scare me most: I don't know. I'm not sure. I've made a decision, but sometimes I question it. But I'm mostly going to tell you about the stuff that's made me sad about my decision this week. It doesn't mean, I think, that my decision--our decision, because Pynchon is obviously a stakeholder here, too--was the wrong one, or that I want to change. I just think there might be value in saying that I don't think any choice about how to care for young children is an unalloyed good. Even the ray of sunshine is only visible in its refraction off airborne dirt, right? I guess this is a post about the airborne dirt.

In the immortal words: you take the good, you take the bad, you take them both, and there you have, the facts of life.

So here's the thing. I miss Ms. Munchkin. Her dad misses her too. We've hardly seen her all week, and much of time we do have together is of the supper-to-bedtime meltdown-management variety. From our calculations, we've been seeing her about three or so hours a day, sometimes less, and it just doesn't feel like enough.

What's going on? Well, Munchkin goes to daycare on campus where I work, and while she loves it and the workers and the other babies and the snacks and the toys and the crafts, this week, she's been pretty much on nap strike. I guess she's having too much fun. Or some of the other babies are on different schedules and wake her up prematurely. Whatever. While she has two naps a day at home on the weekend, each of about an hour and a half duration, at daycare she hit a new low on Monday of 20 minutes. All day. What this results in is a very tired and cranky baby who loads up on sleep at home.

Wednesday, for example, when I went to pick her up, she was happily playing with a puzzle, but she burst into tears when she saw me, because she was just so tired. She fell asleep in her carseat before we had even left the parking lot, and I sat in our driveway with her for forty minutes, just hoping that a little nap would mean that supper would pass with no meltdowns, and that she might be a little more cheerful for play time and bath time. She woke up at 5:40pm, and was in bed for the night an hour later, conked out. This is the pattern of the week: in bed really really early, and then not waking up until sometime between 7:20 and 7:40 the next morning. And we leave for the day at 8:40, she jumping excitedly into my arms when I ask, "Is it time to go to daycare?"

She needs the sleep: she's obviously exhausted, and I want her to be well-rested for the next day. I don't like to rush her in the morning, but I can only write academic prose in the early in the day before I get to feeling overwhelmed, and I like to be at it much earlier but can push it to 9:30. I try to compensate by going earlier in the afternoon to pick her up--but yesterday when I did this, she had just gone down for a nap, so I would up sitting around the daycare until closing time, at which point I woke her up, and she cried from exhaustion. So much for a little extra quality time. She went to bed at 6:45 last night, and slept right through until 7:20 this morning.

I can't believe I'm complaining about how long she's sleeping--I remember well enough my despair during her infancy that she wasn't sleeping enough, and that I was just so desperate for a little alone time. Well. Now Pynchon and I feel like we're running a bed and breakfast, because this week at least, that's pretty much all we do: we're a crib and cracker operation.

So I feel bad about daycare this week. It's a great place for her and she's safe and well cared for, yada yada yada. But they get to see her all day, and send her home an exhausted, cranky, overwhelmed wreck, and I don't get to do much but feed her, clean her, and put her to bed before bringing her back.

Not all weeks are like this. When she naps well at daycare, she stays up a little later at home, and more happily. She wakes a little earlier in the morning, and we can all take it a bit slower as a result. That's when I feel great about my decision. But during weeks like this, where I see so little of her it hurts me, I feel terrible, and I question myself as a mother, and I question my decisions about child care.

I just wanted to put that out there, to make myself vulnerable--I guess to add a bit more humanity to my own decision and its ramifications. I really believe in early childhood education by trained and well-paid workers with benefits and government pensions. I wanted a government-regulated setting for Munchkin's care, healthy food and no TV and lots of outdoor time on safe equipment. I investigated and I visited. I paid and I pay. It was my choice, and while it usually feels right to me, that's not to say that there's no downside. And I just wanted to acknowledge that.

I miss my Munchkin.